Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
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the music had direct connections to political mobilizations. Musicians and cultural actors offered direct critiques of common problems and gave practical and symbolic support to community mobilizations. For example, on July 2, 1944, Boyle Heights native and Verve founder Norman Granz staged a benefit concert to help fund the SLDC. Nearly 2,000 people attended the inaugural Jazz at the Philharmonic Concert, where the imagined solidarities across racial lines took material form in music made by Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet, J.J. Johnson, Les Paul, and Nat King Cole. As musicologist and jazz historian Scott DeVeaux notes, the performers that night presented music that was “firmly aligned with racial politics . . . with all proceeds donated to the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Fund.”81
Music that raised money for political purposes and that asserted and punctuated the self-activity and solidarity of the coalition that supported the Sleepy Lagoon defendants manifested one form of spatial contestation and entitlement. Another manifestation came from the citations of street life that pervaded the music composed and performed by Lalo Guerrero and the Pachuco Boogie Boys. Their songs countered the image of pachucos as treasonous and unpatriotic by celebrating a sociopolitical and cultural identity that Blacks and Chicanos shared. The songs “Pachuco Boogie,” “Chucos Suaves,” and “Marijuana Boogie” contained lyrics, but they were also nonlinguistic communications that projected “an alternative body of cultural and political expression that considers the world critically from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation.”82 Like the concomitant political struggles waged in their constituent communities, these sounds had a legacy most immediately heard in the music of Thee Midnighters (“Whittier Boulevard”), Cannibal & The Headhunters (“Land of 1000 Dances”), and The Salas Brothers, all of whom forged their own East LA sound on these foundations.
Young Black zoot suiters created “a fast-paced, improvisational language which sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype of the stuttering, tongue-tied Sambo,” enabling them to “negotiate an identity that resisted the hegemonic culture and its attendant racism and patriotism.”83 In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison wrote of the protagonist’s first encounter with zoot suiters, calling them “the stewards of something uncomfortable.”84 Indeed, it was through the experiences of participating in zoot suit riots in Harlem that Malcolm X began his transformative political education. Here we can even see a sonic politics of the vernacular. As Kelley explains, “in a world where whites commonly addressed them as ‘boy,’ zoot suiters made a fetish of calling each other ‘man.’”85 He observes that for many Black youths, this subculture allowed them to break with “the rural folkways (for many, the ‘parent culture’) which still survived in most black urban households, and the class-conscious, integrationist attitudes of middle-class blacks.”86
Similarly, Mexican-American youths stood in symbolic opposition to the assimilationist aims of their middle-class counterparts. Both groups “received similar treatment from law enforcement, judges, juries, and the general Anglo public.”87 Through zoot culture, however, Black and Mexican working-class youth crossed boundaries to form alliances and assert their humanity in the face of this degrading treatment. Moreover, the practices of commercial popular culture offered opportunities to develop skills that could be utilized in political mobilizations. As Mark Anthony Neal argues in his cogent analysis of the relationship between Black culture and Black politics in his work on the Chitlin’ Circuit:
that same network that was used in order to promote shows would be the same network that would be used when Martin Luther King came to town and was giving a speech . . . would be the same network that would be used to get folks to come out to a church for an organizational meeting.88
In their respective activism, Bass and Moreno had drawn this conclusion many times, over many struggles. Activism was not only aimed at responding to immediate crises but was also a means of building the skills needed for deepening a democratic culture of deliberation and decision making. It required expanding the sphere of politics beyond the voting booth by creating physical and discursive spaces that could support and sustain constellations of struggle. Regina Freer identifies important elements in this work by describing Bass as emblematic of women who “combined ideologies that elsewhere competed, chose multifaceted allies in their struggles” and asserted an entitlement to opportunities that they defined as basic to their humanity and citizenry.89
The Zoot Suit Riots made the interrelationship of Black and Chicano social realities painfully clear. Both groups were losing on the labor front: by the 1945 CIO Convention, plant closures had undercut gains by those who had challenged racism on the shop floor and expanded job opportunities for Blacks in wartime defense industries. The convention proceedings noted that “Negro, Mexican, and all minority groups in California are becoming the first post-war casualty.”90
Violent attacks by whites on Mexican and Black zoot suiters the summer after the Sleepy Lagoon trial underscored the lack of legal remedies available to Blacks and Mexicans who were trying to defend themselves. Mainstream reporting on the Sleepy Lagoon case reinforced existing racial stereotypes, and comments by law-enforcement officials characterized Chicano zoot suiters as the “predictable results of the primitive and backward culture of the ‘Mexican colony.’”91 As George Sánchez demonstrates through the story of Pedro García—the American-born son of Mexican immigrants who was beaten and left unconscious by servicemen in the company of police witnesses—the physical and ideological violence exacted by white vigilantes made clear to many second-generation Chicanos that “much of their optimism about the future had been misguided.”92
Rhetorical resistance to ideological and physical racism in the wake of the Sleepy Lagoon case and the Zoot Suit Riots powerfully supported the efforts of the SLDC and furthered the platform of antiracism. Letters to the Eastside Sun by East Los Angeles teenagers about the riots reflect the importance of cultural spaces; they did not position themselves primarily as wageworkers or as citizens, but as people who “sought to carve out their own social space, not in terms of exercising union leadership, but by defining a youth culture.”93 Mexican, Anglo, and Black activists and reporters such as Chester Himes and Al Waxman countered mainstream press reports with their own in the Eastside Sun and the California Eagle, reframing the violence by linking official national rhetoric to uphold the principle of the self-determination of oppressed peoples to the need to extend rights to America’s minority communities.94 This strategy was clearly visible in a letter from the Committee to trade unionists asking them to adopt a resolution asking Governor Earl Warren to pardon those convicted: “In its first rounds,” wrote Cary McWilliams and Bella Joseph, “[the Sleepy Lagoon case] represents a fascist victory.”95
Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno expanded on this ideological identification of the Sleepy Lagoon case as an example of incipient fascism. Bass likened the LAPD’s response to Hitler’s race theories and harshly criticized the Sheriff’s Department for urging the Grand Jury to consider the “biological basis” for the criminal behavior of Mexican youth and their “desire to kill.”96 In a speech contending that police attacks historically targeted “minority communities—Mexican American and Negro”97—Moreno astutely identified the Grand Jury testimony as “a reflection of the general reactionary drive against organized labor and minority problems, [sowing] all sorts of division among the various racial, national, and religious groups among the workers.”98 In a statement that underscored the importance of leisure and recreational spaces in the cartography of white supremacy in Los Angeles, Moreno protested the harassment of youth who patronized mixed-race bars and clubs.99 Bass used her writings in the Eagle to change community understandings of this case and others during the war. In successive weeks, the newspaper carried two-inch headlines across page one, such as “TRIGGER-HAPPY COP FREED AFTER SLAYING YOUTH” and “POLICE BRUTALITY FLARES UP AGAIN.”100 Her efforts galvanized other journalists to make similar connections. Lynn Itagaki identifies the journalism of Chester Himes as emblematic of this line of argument, noting:
Referring to the Nazi storm troopers, [Chester Himes called] the servicemen who were instigating the riots a “reincarnation” or “continuation of the vigilantes, the uniformed Klansmen,” conflating the foreign enemy with American white supremacists.